An unholy alliance between Jeremy Paxman and the government's "patriotism envoy", Michael Wills, has corrupted the idea of Englishness. The two have led us to believe that the English are a pragmatic, politically acquiescent and innately tolerant tribe. The English have become the dreary denizens of middle England. Yet any sustained reading of British and Irish history, not least the civil wars of the 1640s, shows the English to be a passionate, revolutionary and frequently brutal people.

Jeremy Paxman's The English: A Portrait of a People has been one of the silent forgers of modern English patriotism. In an era wracked by national self-doubt, Paxman sets out a well-crafted credo for Englishness. The book lovingly pokes fun at every cherished aspect of our "national character" - rural nostalgia, laughing at foreigners, obsessional wordplay - but reassuringly concludes that ultimately Englishness is a conservative state of mind. Yes, there might have been riots and rebellions, but at heart we are modest and pragmatic.

The government has fallen in behind this view. Michael Wills has defined the values that might be included in a national code for new immigrants as tolerance and, in true Edwardian style, "a sense of the importance of fair play". Generously, Wills also attributes to us a sense of duty, an outward-looking approach and, rather wonderfully, being against "forced marriages and genital mutilation".

Despite all the New Labour language of creativity and openness, what Wills leaves us with is still the same cloying vision of Englishness which Stanley Baldwin, George Orwell and John Major revelled in. The land of anvils, cycling maids and long shadows, pigeon fanciers and red telephone boxes. Come what may, the gently resolute Englishman lives on.

But history relates that the English are not an especially tolerant, pragmatic or just people. They have a long history of political radicalism, militant religiosity and sometimes staggering brutality. Nowhere is this more evident than during the defining years of these islands' history - the civil wars of the 17th century.

In the 1640s the English went to war against themselves, the Scottish and then the Irish in a savage conflict which killed more than a quarter of a million people - the greatest loss of life prior to the first world war. What sparked it were the supposedly un-English attributes of fervent religious belief and deeply held political principles. According to Paxman, "the English are not a churchy people". They like their religion "understated and reasonably reliable". Not in the 17th century they didn't.

A vicious doctrinal tussle over the Church of England between Puritans and a high church faction set off the civil war. King Charles I's quasi-Catholic reforms led thousands to rebel. The fabled English pragmatism, the third way solution, was far from evident as Roundheads and Cavaliers thrashed out their religious differences in battlefields across the country.

State control collapsed and a wealth of anarchic political ideas emerged. England's radical heritage was born at the Leveller debates in Putney and at the Digger commune in Surrey.

But it was the trial and execution of Charles I which provided one of the most revolutionary moments in European history. Despite pleas for clemency, a constitutional settlement or exile, Cromwell forced through the death warrant. Out with the monarchy went the House of Lords, the bishops and the established Church of England. In their place came "tolerance" for all shades of Protestant nonconformity. But not for Catholics.

The English tradition of tolerance was not much in evidence as Cromwell massacred his way through Catholic Ireland. In England, he presided over a soulless war state, abolishing parliament and introducing just the kind of military dictatorship which many English regard as the defining mark of continental Europe.

On into the 18th century, the English spirit happily connived at the brutal suppression of Jacobites in Scotland and the enforcement of Anglican supremacy in England, to say nothing of its "outward looking" approach to the Atlantic slave trade.

In the 19th and 20th century, the passions of English nonconformity divided the newly industrialising cities and, from Governor Eyre in Jamaica to the English officers at Amritsar, the crimes of empire displayed the awful consequence of an ingrained intolerance.

Every nation has a dark past, and England's is certainly less dark than many. Yet the dearly held idea of English exceptionalism, our supposedly unique history of tolerance and openness compared with the continent, no longer seems viable.

The English civil war or revolution has often been regarded as an aberration - a moment when the nation and then the king lost its head. Yet perhaps the passion, brutality, and intellectualism of the civil war years should more accurately be regarded as just as peculiarly English as tolerance and openness. And for my money, I would rather Cromwell than Michael Wills's bicycling maids.

Tristram Hunt's series on the English civil war begins tonight at 8.30pm on BBC2